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Tuesday, May 07, 2013

I’m not sure how to start this one, but I know where I want to go with it. So
let’s just jump right in.

Associated Press: FBI officials said
Monday they foiled a terrorist attack being planned in a small western Minnesota
town, but they offered no details about the exact targets of the attack _ or the
motive of the man accused of having a cache of explosives and weapons in a
mobile home.

The FBI said "the lives of several local residents were
potentially saved" with the arrest of Buford Rogers, 24, who made his first
appearance Monday in U.S. District Court in St. Paul on one count of being a
felon in possession of a firearm.

Rogers, of Montevideo, was arrested
Friday after authorities searched a mobile home he’s associated with and found
Molotov cocktails, suspected pipe bombs and firearms, according to a court
affidavit.

ABC News’ Matthew Jaffe reports via Twitter that the FBI told him Buford is a "militia
type" -- meaning one of those rightwing extremist domestic terrorists we’ve all been
assured are imaginary. And that’s enough to trigger a whine from the right. The
wingnut blog Jammie Wearing Fool would like to inform you that the real victim here is the Tea Party.

↓ CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP ↓

We’re just applying the mainstream
media standard for reportage here. C’mon, a guy name Buford with a so-called
assault rifle living in a trailer park? Why he has to be a tea party
guy, right? He meets every possible stereotype. Of course we have no evidence to
support that assertion, but that hasn’t stopped the left from wild speculation
any time there’s a terror incident or mass shooting.

Yeah,
no evidence of terrorism -- other than the FBI saying they’ve stopped a
terrorist attack. How completely irresponsible of the lamestream media to repeat
the things they’re told by law enforcement. No one’s actually saying the guy’s
Tea Party, they’re saying he’s a rightwing nutjob. Granted, those would seem to
be the same thing at first glance -- and most often are -- but it’s possible to
be one without being the other. Think vanilla and French vanilla.

But how
whiny is it that JWF feels the need to jump right in immediately and proclaim
media victimhood? This seems a bit like a hangover from the Boston
bombing. When news of that broke, a lot of people -- responsibly, if you ask me
-- warned not to jump to conclusions. It could’ve been an Islamic
terrorist or could’ve been a rightwing extremist; we didn’t know.

And
that was all it took.The rightwing blogosphere went nuts with victim cards. It
turned out that acknowledging the very real possibility that the bombing was the
work of a rightwinger was verboten by wingnut political correctness.
And now they’re getting into niggling and pointless little distinctions; yes,
the would-be mass-murderer was likely a rightwing fanatic -- but don’t you dare
say he was part of the Tea Party!

Because... Well, I’m not sure about the
because. Just because.

Consider how silly this all is. Imagine that this was
the first rightwing domestic terrorist ever. Imagine that such an animal had
never been seen in the wild before. But imagine the Republican Party and the Tea
Party were exactly the same. They’ve been openly hostile to the very idea of
government. They’ve been obsessed with guns and the need for the ability to kill
members of the police, military, and government (what do you think "fighting
tyranny" would actually look like, after all?). And, while talking about the
need to kill tyrants, they also accuse everything they don’t agree with of being
"tyranny." For chrissakes, curly fluorescent lightbulbs are supposedly tyranny.

So
you’ve got people who hate government and want to kill tyrants. And these are
the same people who see tyranny under every rock. Polling shows that nearly half of all Republican voters think
armed revolution "might be necessary" in the near future. A reasonable person
wouldn’t be out of line to wonder when all this tyrant-fighting was going to
start and it wouldn’t be unreasonable to think it could be any second now. And
when they hear about a terrorist attack with an unknown motive, it’s not
unreasonable to wonder if maybe all this tyrant-killing has finally gotten under
way.

In other words; if you don’t want people to assume you’re a
terrorist, don’t spend most of your time talking like a goddam terrorist. If
you’re spending a lot of time talking about going to war with the American
government and murdering and assassinating your fellow Americans, don’t whine
when people assume you’re serious. And now that some rightwing nutjob is almost
certainly an honest-to-goodness, for-real terrorist, we’ve got the right whining
that Buford is not being classified as the correct kind of rightwing nutjob.
Maybe it might be a good time to give it a rest, OK? Maybe turn off the victim
machine for a bit, because it’s finally blown a logical gasket.

But if
being called a terrorist bothers the right so much, maybe using a threat to use
deadly violence any second now as a mantra isn’t the best way to approach
politics. Maybe the best way to avoid being accused of terrorism is to stop
talking like you’re a terrorist.